“Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara & Gerald Murphy,” at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is an immensely satisfying show about fine, complicated people who loved life in exemplary ways, in superb company, and suffered misfortune. It is also an art show that centers on seven paintings by Gerald, all that remain of the fourteen he is known to have made in the nineteen-twenties. (The others were lost, owing largely to his own indifference.) In addition, there is work by Picasso, Léger, Gris, and other modern masters whom the Murphys befriended, supported, and, at times, inspired. Without it, tales of Gerald and Sara, moderately wealthy and irrepressibly sociable Jazz Age American expatriates in France, would be mainly deluxe gossip, filtered through their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” in which they figure as the charismatic Dick and Nicole Diver. Their story was vivified by Calvin Tomkins in his 1962 New Yorker Profile and later book, “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” and by Amanda Vaill in her 1998 biography, “Everybody Was So Young.” Tomkins and Vaill are among the ten essayists in the show’s catalogue, who, led by the curator Deborah Rothschild, neglect no aspect of Murphyana, including the long-veiled sidelight of Gerald’s homosexuality. Usually, I’m unbeguiled by the rich and glamorous, and I attended “Making It New” in a resisting mood. Then I looked.

Gerald’s paintings are a gold standard that backs, with creative integrity, the paper money of the couple’s legend. He started by assisting on sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with quick lessons from the painter Natalia Goncharova. His work consists of crisply hard-edged, cunningly composed, subtly colored, semi-abstract pictures of machinery, common objects, architectural fragments, and, in a disturbing final image, a wasp battening on a pear. Numerous influences are plain, but Gerald jumped ahead of his time with a laconic style that was prescient of big-scale abstraction and of Pop art. (If one of the lost paintings, “Boatdeck”—a sensation at the 1924 Salon des Indépendants, in Paris—had survived, it surely would be an icon of modernism. Eighteen feet high by twelve wide, it billboarded transatlantic cultural intercourse with a tremendous image of ocean-liner structures.) “Watch” (1925), depicting clockwork, achieves a spankingly representational translation of Cubism. “Razor” (1924), which monumentalizes a safety razor, a fountain pen, and a matchbox, might enable future archeologists to reimagine the essential theory and practice of modern art, should every other example perish. It is by a man who wasn’t really an artist.

Gerald’s father owned Mark Cross, the luxury-goods business; Sara’s was a printing magnate. Gerald’s family was Irish Catholic, from Boston; Sara’s a union of Norwegian and pedigreed American, from Illinois. They met at a party in East Hampton, in 1904, when she was twenty-one and he sixteen. Friendship became romance after his graduation from Yale, where he was popular but unhappy. She seems to have taken in stride his confessed attraction to men, which he strove to suppress. They married in 1915 and soon had a girl and two boys. Gerald volunteered for military service not quite in time to fight in the First World War. He then studied landscape architecture at Harvard. William James, Jr., the son of the philosopher, painted Sara’s portrait—an astonishingly lovely and telling picture, which is in the show. In June of 1921, the culturally ambitious Murphys decamped for England. By September, they were in Paris, where they found old friends, notably Cole Porter, and plunged into circles of the avant-garde, primarily that of the Russians around Diaghilev and Stravinsky. Picasso, having married the ballerina Olga Khokhlova, was a frequent presence. To celebrate the première of Stravinsky’s ballet “Les Noces,” in 1923, Gerald and Sara threw a fabled all-night party on a barge on the Seine. The same year, Gerald and Porter collaborated on a riotously successful jazz ballet, “Within the Quota,” a burlesque on American culture.

Porter and his wife, Linda, had introduced the Murphys to Antibes, a resort where, at the time, few people stayed in the summer. In 1923, they bought a seaside chalet, dubbed Villa America, and helped to change that. They hosted the Picassos and close to everybody else who counted in adventurous art and literature. American visitors included Man Ray, Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and, of most consequence, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. (For the atmospherics of Villa America, consult the incandescent opening pages of “Tender Is the Night.”) Anecdotes abound. Questions linger. Did Picasso bed Sara? That sturdy rumor is probably untrue, though the artist was smitten, as were many other men. Sara’s features are suggested in certain of his “neoclassical” paintings—“Woman Seated in an Armchair” (1923) gives dazzling evidence in the show—but Picasso was on a break, at the time, from being obsessed with particular women. His masterpiece involving the Murphys, “The Pipes of Pan” (1923), was based on a photograph of himself clowning on the beach with a stiffly posing Gerald.

Two things intrigue me in accounts of the Murphys’ conduct. One is how effectively Gerald concealed his sexual ambivalence. Even his sophisticated intimates Fitzgerald and Hemingway seem uncertain, though Hemingway had occasion to deplore a shifty unreliability, compounded of guilt and fear, at Gerald’s core. (His gradual disaffection became outright cruelty in “A Moveable Feast,” where he sneered at “the understanding rich.”) Also striking is the fact that Gerald and Sara collected only American folk art. The abnegation bespeaks a will to remain participants in, rather than patrons of, the creative life. Their expressive means included decorative flair (white walls and black satin in the villa) and wit (Sara wore her pearls to the beach because, she explained, they wanted sunning). Rothschild writes that Gerald “meticulously planned, intellectualized, and expended great effort in order to make each moment a beautiful event.”

The idyll disintegrated in 1929, owing to financial setbacks and, most gravely, the onset of their younger son Patrick’s fatal tuberculosis. Amid years of frantic efforts to save Patrick, their other son, Baoth, died suddenly, of meningitis; both boys were gone by 1937. The family had returned to America, where Gerald took over Mark Cross, then on the brink of bankruptcy, and, grudgingly, spent the rest of his working life preserving it. The hospitality of their home in Snedens Landing, just up the Hudson from New York City, seems to have been a sweet but pale afterimage of their former salon. (Sara instructed Calvin Tomkins in the right way to drink champagne—with eyes raised to the trees above.) Gerald had all but closed an iron door on the memory of his meteoric painting career when, in 1960, the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts mounted a revival. He later remarked, “I’ve been discovered. What does one wear?” The seven paintings and the odd minor work on paper, seen together, really do project a career, which was strongest at the start. The grotesquerie of “Wasp and Pear” (1929), with its hints of psychic turmoil, may have been a gambit to check a slide into overly exquisite effects. At any rate, it’s unlikely that Gerald, had he continued, would have improved. What he used in his art, he used up.

The Murphys served Fitzgerald as symbols of the great theme of the Lost Generation: romantic disappointment, given intensity by the majesty of the dreams at stake. Gerald seemed to concur in a letter to Fitzgerald in 1935, praising “Tender Is the Night.” (Sara hated the book.) He wrote, “Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty.” But this came amid the trauma of Baoth’s death. (“Life itself has stepped in now and blundered, scarred, and destroyed.”) In fact, Gerald and Sara lived well, with dignity, from start to finish. The most revelatory and moving item in the show for me is a letter from Zelda Fitzgerald, following Scott’s death, in 1940. She writes that Scott’s love of the Murphys reflected a “devotion to those that he felt were contributing to the aesthetic and spiritual purposes of life.” There is a world of excitement and woe in that conflation of the aesthetic and the spiritual. It’s a madness, which life will punish. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.